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The Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market is growing fast, as enterprises race to a more efficient cloud model for application development and deployment. While PaaS solutions enable the cloud, they don't always have to reside outside of an enterprise's firewall.

Ashesh Badani, GM of the Cloud Business Unit, explained that OpenShift Enterprise is an on-premise PaaS that provides auto-scaling, self service features and is enterprise class.

"Today you can leverage the OpenShift Online service but it has now been packaged for enterprise consumption using the same code base," Badani said. "In the past, we allowed users to focus on the applications. Now enterprises can take that application platform that they see online and run it on premise."

The OpenShift Online PaaS service was launched in May 2011 as a free service. In June of this year, Red Hat announced pricing for commercial levels of service for OpenShift, under the product name Megashift. Megashift includes access to the online platform as well as storage capacity.

The Enterprise release brings that capability on premise, enabling users to scale using their own infrastructure. That infrastructure includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on which OpenShift Enterprise runs.

The OpenShift Enterprise release is now part of Red Hat's overall approach to cloud deployment, which includes the OpenStack cloud as well.

"Today OpenShift runs on RHEL and JBoss and because of that we can host it on the Amazon cloud as well as on premise," Brian Stevens, CTO of Red Hat said. "We can do that across bare metal, virtualization and ultimately, when we have our OpenStack product available next year, on top of OpenStack as well."

Red Hat's OpenStack platform was updated last week to a new preview based on the OpenStack Folsom release.

While Red Hat is now pushing forward with OpenShift Enterprise, it remains committed to the OpenShift Origin open source project and the free online tiers of service for OpenShift. Badani stressed that nothing has changed with free bits of OpenShift and the online free tiers will still be available for free.

"The Red Hat OpenShift model is similar to Red Hat's open source model for the rest of its technologies," Badani said. "Users are free to run our open source software, whether it's Fedora on the Linux side or JBoss for middleware, there is no forced migration that occurs with Red Hat."

Though the OpenShift technology is freely available, Badani noted that over time, users find that they can benefit from having an enterprise level relationship with Red Hat.

"Many users find benefits in a commercially supported offering that is stable and has an enterprise lifecycle," Badani said.

Currently the OpenShift Enteprise release is using bits that are mostly the same as what can be found in the open source OpenShift Origin project as well as the online service. Over time, Badani expects that to change.

"We fully expect OpenShift Origin releases to move in a more rapid way than they are today," Badani said. "As OpenShift Enterprise gets adopted we expect an enterprise lifecycle to come into play."

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.